Incandescent
by youaretoosmart
Summary: Incandescent; [in-kuh n-des-uh nt]; adjective: 1. Produced by incandescence; glowing or white with heat. 2. Intensely bright, brilliant. 3. Brilliant, masterly; very impressive, successful, or intelligent. 4. Full of strong emotion, passionate. / Lydia Martin is incandescent.


_Incandescent; [in-kuh n-des-uh nt]; adjective._

 _1\. Produced by incandescence; glowing or white with heat._

Scott's face is relaxed by sleep, and sometimes his skin makes a little squeaking sound when it slides down the window by half an inch, but Stiles can't stop watching him from the corner of his eye, knees jiggling and fingers restless on the back of the bus seat.

Around midnight, there's a rustling sound to his left that reminds him suddenly of what he's been trying to forget since it happened. Lydia is sitting next to him, separated by an alley and the weight on her shoulders. Stiles wishes he could bear it for her, because Lydia strides along hallways and life with her back straight and her chin up; she doesn't slouch in dirty bus seats with weary eyes.

He meets her eyes, and when she gestures at the door of the bus, he nods immediately. By the time he makes his way out of the creaking bus, Lydia is already huddled under the white light of a streetlamp.

"You okay?" He asks in a low voice when he's close.

"I just—I can't sleep," she sighs, worrying her cuffs. "I keep seeing this fire, and Scott—"

Lydia's pale skin looks ethereal under the violent white light, and looking at her like this, it suddenly feels like hands pushing at his back and the warmth of a small body covering his.

"I need to tell you something," she mutters, turning away from the bus as if it could stop the wolves from hearing. "In the fire, I saw something. A kind of figure."

"A figure," he echoes, stomach churning. "In the fire. The darach?"

She shakes her head.

"I don't know for sure, but yes. And _no_ , I don't know why I could see it. I. Have. No. Idea," she says, frustrated.

"We'll figure it out tomorrow, speak with Scott," Stiles promises her. "We should get some sleep. No one's going anywhere, okay?" He adds when she doesn't say anything. "Lydia, that's thanks to _you_."

She nods with a thin smile, and Stiles just wants to comfort her in every way he can, but that bright, blazing fire is carved on the back of his eyelids and he knows it's on hers, too. It can't be erased that easily, so they just go back to the bus in silence, and they fall asleep next to each other, separated by an alley they bridge with their legs.

 _2\. Intensely bright, brilliant._

The light is soft in the locker room, and everything is bathed in lazy yellow rays. Stiles knows this, objectively, because he's already been there at that time of the afternoon before.

Now, though, now that his lungs are pressed tight against his ribcage, and his breath comes out in short, ragged spurts, everything looks too bright, too blurry, and too much in focus all at once. The sun is blinding him, or maybe that's the spots dancing in front of his eyes.

She's kissing him before he can fully realize what is happening. She closes her eyes and furrows her brow, maybe—certainly—in concentration, but his own stay open for too long. He can see the little fly-away hair that crown her head, and the faint wrinkles on her shoulder, where her bag has creased the fabric all day. He closes his eyes when everything becomes overwhelming, and her lips become his first anchor to the world.

"When I kissed you," she explains shakily after his heartbeat slows down in his chest and his voice comes back to him, "you held your breath."

That was smart, Stiles thinks, so as not to focus on the fact that she actually kissed him, actually pressed her lips on his, and that she thought, above everything else, that it would calm him.

 _(It did.)_

He decides to tell her so, because she looks at him with wide, scared eyes that he doesn't understand.

"That was smart," he breathes, the world easy on his tongue, and when she finally smiles, the world looks even brighter than before.

 _3\. Brilliant, masterly; very impressive, successful, or intelligent._

Lydia looks uncharacteristically small on his bed, even if she has readily taken possession of it with the length of her body and her bare feet.

"No scent," she mutters, still winding the red yarn tight around her finger. "No bomb. And I got you in trouble."

He looks briefly in her eyes, and the way they've darken in the yellowish blue light of his bedroom makes him lower his. The string is wrapped tight around her pointer finger, and he can see that the tip is already starting to redden.

"Okay, look," he says in a low voice. "Barrow was there. All right? You knew it. You felt it."

He hates that she feels so down, and he really wants her to look at herself and see what he's always seeing, see how amazing and brilliant she is, in any circumstances. So he puts in his tone all his trust in her and her brain, which he can now say, as he already did in sixth grade but with actual proof, is her best feature.

His voice may be too loving, and his eyes too soft, but that ultimately isn't very important when she purses her lips around a thin smile and looks away. He figures that's good, that he's done his job, if only because she doesn't pick the thread up again, lets it laying flat where it is on the bed.

He begins to fiddle with the green marker in his hand, because it's more bearable to exist under her gaze when he doesn't have to meet it. _Apple scented!_ the sticker brags, and even though he knows it's a far cry from the real smell, he can't help but pass it slightly under his nose.

It makes him think about that time they were discussing inhalants danger in chemistry, and she kept rolling her eyes at the teacher. Afterwards she'd told him he wasn't being nearly as nuanced as he should have been, considering where the researches were, and that sniffing chemicals in markers and sharpies isn't—

"Get up," he says. "Get up now. We're going to the school."

 _4\. Full of strong emotion, passionate_

Every step hurts, and Stiles just wants to stop and curl into a ball on the floor, though the very idea of forcing his limbs in such a tight position makes him nauseous. He keeps glancing at Lydia, at her tight and closed face, the way she scrunches up her eyebrows and bits her lips under his weight.

"Sorry," he says breathlessly when she trips after him. "Wait, did you sprain—"

She rotates her ankle in her heeled boots but doesn't stop.

"Come on," she mutters, eyes fixed on Scott and Kira who jog ahead. "Come on, Stiles."

He's not sure he has ever heard her sound so anxious, so he complies, one foot after the other, basking in the warmth her hands spread on his back and his hip.

.

He only leaves her side to pick the the sword up.

"Stiles, no!" He hears Scott yells from far away. There's no reason for him to sound so muffled, and the only thing Stiles can think of is that he's _dying_.

He lifts the sword with shaky hands, and puts the tip of the blade against his stomach, feeling the cold seep from the point to his new skin.

He can see Lydia's shivering reflection on the metal, fiery red in the black and white world, crowned by the snow that drifts gently onto her hair. He crosses her gaze on the blade, because he can't bring himself to lift his eyes to her face.

"What if it saves you?" he says, and he tries not to feel like he's only talking to her. His breath blurs her image on the sword. "What if it saves all of you?"

"What if it's just another trick?" she cries out, sounding nearly as breathless as him.

The wind blows over the Nogitsune's scratchy voice, but Stiles doesn't listen. He keeps his eyes on Lydia's reflected face, follows the way her hair fly around her face when she silently shakes her head, urging him not to do it and _put the sword down Stiles_ and _there has to be another way out_.

"You have no moves left," the Nogitsune hisses.

Lydia's face crumples and she claps her hands on her mouth, as if to block her screams when they come.

Stiles lifts his head. He wants to tell her a million things, most of all _I'm sorry_ and _I love you_ (and the fact that he's not sure of the order scares him), but his parched lips won't open.

When he looks back down, shivering, he searches for Lydia again, but she doesn't appear on the blade anymore—maybe she's moved, or he's angling the sword differently. Instead, he can make out the faint outline of an econ book, lying in the snow behind him.

"I do," he says, and he can hear Lydia's lonely sob when he lowers the blade. "A divine move."

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